In all seriousness, it was a mixture of factors. After becoming more and more engrossed in Japanese mediums I eventually stumbled upon VNs and thought of them as an interesting medium, though my opinion was initially soured a lot because I typically kept getting recommendations for adult games which led to me thinking those were the vast majority of titles for a while. Eventually I learned of more acclaimed titles such as Type Moon VNs or ones from Key, which filled my want for more serious stories that weren't that focused on the sex. Overall it started with shows, then games.

It reminded me of old text based games I played, and with such a focus on story it got me wanting to make my own. So that's what I'm doing.

Honestly, because VNs is one of the easier game genres to get into development for. Many game engines either require you pay a fair bit for its use or require a lot of programmer saavy, which can be a hurdle to get over if you're just starting out or don't have a team. VN making is something I found I could do by myself or with a team, and it's come surprisingly handy before. I've gone to game jams where teams ended up lopsided in the skills department and being able to offer an alternative sort of game helps keep people involved.

Plus, a lot of games I've played and enjoyed are of the VN genre, such as Ace Attorney and Zero Escape, so it's nice to have a baseline to aim for.

For me it was Zeiva's demo for X-Note. I've never heard of visual novels before, spending an overwhelming majority of my time, free or not, on reading a lot (it was a period in my life where I check out 2-3 novels daily from the school library and finish them in one afternoon, before moving on to read long fanfics in the evenings. I had no friends.). I was never really into games other than turn-based strategy since I'm really jumpy and panic easily, and just the idea that a game could be, well, about reading really got my brain going. Not only did it seem simple enough for me to not just make, but also get creative with it, it's also easy to play.

It was also 2012, and 2011 was the first year I started NaNo-- and also won. I was pretty much high on the idea of writing, and after spending exam hours brainstorming on the back of these things, I ended up actually googling things that would allow me to start putting those ideas into something concrete. It landed me on Ren'py and this forum.

I was 14, then, and my ideas were terrible. But here I am, 5 years later, and somehow I'm still returning to LSF year after year despite long hiatuses so I think I might be sticking around for a while.

I tried to make an RPG and failed; it was too much work, and I was mainly interested in the story aspects, so that's when I discovered visual novels and decided to go with that instead. A bonus was that VN's allowed for much higher quality artwork which had more appeal.

(Later on, I discovered that I was just biting off more than I could chew with my first game project. And now that RPG Maker has advanced to have better capabilities, I am thinking of going away from VN's again once I finish my current project)

When I was in high school, I wanted to make animated short films, but I realised that I had so many story ideas that I couldn't make multiple films at a steady, prolific pace. Then I discovered visual novels through Newgrounds games like Air Pressure and fan game VNs.

Although visual novels are still very labour intensive, their use of static image and text makes it more friendly for one-person creators trying to tell a story.

(I still make animated short films, but I'll pick which ideas I'll make into visual novel and which ideas I feel are more suited to be made into an animated short).

I was into those choose your options adventure books and then I found out that there was an electronic version (with pictures!) called visual novels and I thought they were cool so I started making them.
My motto is pretty much "Can't find a visual novel with an idea, concept or genre that you like? Make one!" Haha.

Otome games brought me into visual novel world (> O <)
I thought that series like Tokimeki Memorial Girl' Side or Storm Lovers Kai were really fun to play (and I like bishies <3). Unfortunately, I can only make simple projects for now. Anyway, I'm more happy drawing than coding so I hope someone will need my art for rasing stats otome game someday! ^^

If its what made me pay attention to VN as a medium, that would be a BL game I came across in 2014 (I never play any real VN before).

But the main reason: it's a story telling medium that work well with an artist, it's aesthetically pleasing but not as resource demanding as comic, and it require writing but not at novelist level kind of writing (at least when I can make up for it with CG and visual)

I loved drawing since I was a kid and dreamed to be a Manga artist growing up (until I got a reality check that it's a lot of works to live as a comic artist without starving). Even then I drew a lot of short comic over the year, drawing action come natural to me and it's hard for me to come up with story without drawing. I found that skill works very well for VN, and I also used to draw BG a lot back when I was drawing comic so that skill come in handy. It take less drawing effort than comic because a lot of thing can be reused, so I find it an ideals medium to tell my own story. I also enjoyed doing commission work for VN, because drawing CG feel a lot like drawing comic, it's really fun to see everything come together at the end of a project ^^.

Probably a different reason than most of other devs: we manage a niche digital publishing firm, and for a couple of years we struggled about the evolution of ebooks. I believe that the answer is: Visual Novel already are the evolution of ebooks, they just target the "wrong" market so outside the anime fans most of people don't even know about them.

Despite having played VN or VN-like games in the past (Ace Attorney, Katawa Shoujo and other usual suspect), funnily the VN which ignited the idea was one i bought at a steam sale because it was super cheap and a gimmick: Hatoful Boyfriend. "Hey, that is clever and fun but also look quite cheap and not so hard to make" I thought, and then found out about Ren'py and Lemmasoft.

Last edited by Frullo on Mon Jun 05, 2017 8:14 am, edited 1 time in total.